A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Read online

“Would you like to have dinner?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Colette answered quickly. “When?”

  “Um, I don’t know. Tonight?” Gabriel said. There was a silence. Gabriel closed his eyes, though it felt like it was brighter behind his lids. Why was he so awkward? Had it been so long since he’d asked someone out?

  “Yeah, okay, sure. Where do you want to meet?”

  Gabriel ran through a mental log of places he’d eaten before. They were few. The couscous place near school. That place he passed by on his way to the métro. Very French: candles and boars’ heads and lots of silverware. Finally, he named a touristy brasserie where he’d never eaten.

  Colette laughed. “You’re hilarious.”

  Gabriel laughed as well, as though he’d meant to make a joke. “You decide.”

  She said, “La Tour de L’Oqueau,” and named an address.

  Gabriel hung up, elated. There was nothing to do to clean up, no paints to cover, no chemicals to dispose of. Just put the pencil back into the box and close the coffee table book. It was like Gabriel was never even there.

  Elm

  Elm’s colleague Ian had investigated the Attic and returned with some postcard-sized oils and accompanying drawings of the Hudson River School. Whittredge, not Elm’s favorite, but still name enough to draw the Hudson River Rats out of the proverbial woodwork for the fall auctions. Elm asked Ian to do the legwork—confirm the provenance, send the pieces to the authenticator, investigate potential reserves. The Hudson River School was in a minor resurgence—there’d been a secondary exhibit at the Fogg that reacquainted the public with its existence.

  It was only later that day that she realized she had not asked to see the paintings or drawings for herself. This lack of curiosity, she knew, was a symptom of the depression she’d been suffering since Ronan died. She stopped being interested in things not directly affecting her immediate circumstances. She’d lost all natural curiosity: What’s behind that door? What did that person mean? How does wireless work? And here she was, a supposed expert, a presumed devotee, who sent the drawings directly to the lab, to science, when she probably could have told just by looking at them whether they were forged, misattributed, or the real McCoy.

  Elm was a keen judge of drawings, etchings, lithographs, and all prints prior to the twentieth century. She wished she could trust Ian’s eye, but they had both agreed, after a couple of martinis at the Algonquin Hotel one night, that Ian’s talents lay in client relations—in selling or commissioning art, not in appreciating it. He admired it, adored it even, loved being around it, took an aesthete’s pleasure in viewing it. But he lacked that critical and ineluctable something that allowed a viewer to hear a painting speak—the “eye.” Elm had it, a way of seeing through a painting or drawing, of gathering in an instant its myriad qualities, good or bad, and forming an almost infallible judgment. No amount of study or exposure could teach you the eye if you weren’t born with it. And while it wasn’t necessary to have the eye to work in art (many collectors, gallerists, and even some artists lacked it and were successful), it was essential for a director. Ian would grow and deepen, certainly, gain a greater store of knowledge from which to draw comparisons, but he would always be hobbled by his dead eye.

  Elm’s eye, on the other hand, had been honed since birth, growing up her whole life around Tinsley’s with its revolving museum-like galleries. She looked at the drawings, let her gaze soften, and became, just for the moment, the artist himself. Apart from her acquired knowledge about paper, materials, subject matter, and style, she could effect this transubstantiation. That and her position at Tinsley’s led to her acknowledged preeminence in the field.

  Ian poked his head through her door, then came in and sat down without waiting for an invitation. “So, up near Columbia, right?” he said. It took Elm a minute to figure out he was talking about his visit to the Attic. “Picture one of those old buildings that has housed academics for the past couple hundred years. The lobby’s marble has grooves between door and mailboxes and stairs. The elevator—unspeakable. I took the stairs, of course. Fifth floor. I knock. There’s no answer. But I’d made an appointment with the caregiver. Finally, a shuffling noise, and the door creaks open, straight out of some Bela Lugosi film. This woman, one hundred years old, skin hanging off in folds, some nightmare of old age, answers the door and without speaking waves me in.”

  Here Ian paused for effect. Elm loved his stories the way Moira loved being read to at night. She wanted to hear them over and over again, revel in the inconsistencies, in their slight variations.

  “So I walk into this apartment, and I swear it is unchanged from 1940. I half-expected to see Marlene Dietrich waltz in from stage right. Not only that, it hasn’t been cleaned since then either. And piles and piles of stuff—newspapers, folders, advertisements, boxes, envelopes. Just like the those brothers … What’s their names?”

  “The Collyer brothers,” Elm filled in. They were part of New York lore, the brothers who saved every newspaper for fifty years and then died inside their prison of newsprint.

  “Right. Complete with the paths between piles from kitchen to bedroom to toilet.”

  “Just like the marble grooves in the lobby.”

  “Don’t throw my storytelling inadequacies back at me. What, Homer never repeated an epithet?”

  “Sorry,” Elm said. She leaned forward and put her chin in her hands, pantomiming rapt attention. “Pray, continue.”

  “She still hasn’t spoken to me, but we go into the bedroom, where a wan light is shining through the windows, illuminating the dust motes.”

  “Poetic,” said Elm.

  Ian ignored her. “And then she points to the drawings, which are in a Woolworth’s shopping bag, circa, say, 1920. And I’m wondering if the bag is the artifact she wants us to appraise. So I take the gloves out of my pocket and lean over and remove the drawings—”

  “That like an idiot I forgot to ask to see,” said Elm, sighing.

  “And they’re beautiful. At least, I think they are considering there is no light in the room at all. So I tell her they are beautiful. And then she says to me, ‘Young man, are you a homosexual?’ Ian did his best Katharine Hepburn accent, so that the word sounded like “homo-sucks-shell.”

  “What?” Elm burst out laughing.

  “I know. So I’m imagining all these great responses, like, ‘The guy I’m fucking thinks I am,’ or, ‘I prefer the term fudgepacker’ or something. But I’m such a good boy that I just say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Then she looks up at me, and her eyes are all filmy with cataracts, and she says, ‘My late husband was a homosexual.’ ”

  “Wow, you wandered into some weird gothic novel or something.”

  “Then she turns around and hobbles out of the room. So I put the drawings back. Their archives, by the way, consist of two pieces of construction paper connected with a piece of tape so yellow it’s merged with the paper.”

  “People like that don’t deserve art.” Elm breathed disapproval.

  “Wait. This is the good part of the story. I follow her, and over the bed there’s this painting. So I walk over and wipe the glass with the glove to see the attribution. There’s a note. ‘À Indira avec tout mon amour, René.’ ”

  “So she’s gotten a little action from the love that dare not speak its name too?”

  “No.” Ian’s voice rose with impatience. “Try to keep up, Elmira.”

  “Don’t call me that. Seriously.”

  “René Magritte, my slow one. Indira Schmidt.”

  “No! The Indira Schmidt?”

  “One and only.”

  “Oh, my God. That’s amazing. She’s still alive?”

  “Apparently. Or, rather, barely. So I follow her into the kitchen, where she says to me, ‘Young man, can you make me tea in the English manner?’ So I say, ‘One spoonful you think for each who will drink, and one for the pot, the best that we’ve got.’ ”

  Elm looked at Ian uncomprehendingly. He said, “Gran
dmother was English. It’s … never mind. Anyway, that seemed to convince her that I was somebody or something, because she sat me down and talked to me for, like, five hours. And here’s the gist: Georg Schmidt was a poofter.”

  “Hardly news to the thousands of young men he ‘took under his wing.’ ” Elm’s fingers made quote marks in the air.

  “She had the most amazing life, really. She told me all about escaping Austria, and hiding out in the French countryside, then walking to Belgium, which is where she met Magritte and had this torrid affair. I got the details. All the details.”

  “Eww.”

  “As you say. She’s totally amazing. She said, ‘My ceramics are on display at every major museum in the world. Well, every museum in the civilized world.’ ”

  “That’s priceless,” said Elm. “You are the luckiest guy ever.”

  “Someone should write her biography.”

  “You should,” Elm said. Her computer gurgled, signaling that she had an appointment coming up.

  “I can’t write,” said Ian. “You should do it.”

  “In all my free time.”

  “The woman has an entire museum in there. She’s saved everything—letters, objets.”

  “Can you talk her into parting with some of it? Does she have children?”

  “I don’t know. No living ones anyway.” Elm’s heart lurched. Did they die young? How many did she have? “This is why I’m telling you this, Elm. This could be our focus, if you catch my drift.”

  “I do,” Elm said. “Let me know when the drawings are back. You’re seeing her again?”

  “I’m bringing her croissants from some ancient bakery on the Lower East Side next week.”

  “You are truly the best.” Elm grabbed her purse and kissed Ian on the top of his head.

  “I hear that all the time,” he replied.

  Later that afternoon, there was a quiet knock on the door frame. Colette, from the French office, the one who had the annoying habit of tapping her pen during meetings. That woman was here so often she might as well be working in New York, Elm thought, and saving the company the airfare.

  Colette was the type of woman other women disliked. She flirted with husbands out of habit, and picked lint off other women’s shoulders. Elm also objected to her accent, flawless, just enough Gallic to make you ask where she was born and then exclaim “But you speak so beautifully” when she told you Chalon-sur-Saône. She had the most annoying habit of speaking English as though she had learned it from a grammar primer, but occasionally she’d pause and say, “How do you say? What’s the word? For the scratch-the-sky?” So that you would say, “Oh, skyscraper,” and she would show off the breathy giggle that Parisian women tittered so effortlessly. Elm spoke college French, but her accent was atrocious and the only vocabulary she remembered anymore was for eighteenth-century painting and drawing techniques. Colette also spoke too much in meetings. She was only a step above an administrative assistant, and yet because she had an art conservation and dealership degree from some fancy French université that only the top 5 percent of students qualified for, she felt as though she made up for her inexperience with credentials. Everyone else had an art history degree; only she was qualified in the business of art, at the age of all of thirty, if that. She stuck her nose in every department—offering suggestions to Eastern antiques, medieval painting, display ideas. Be quiet and listen, Elm wanted to tell her.

  “Oh, you are just the person with whom I wanted to speak,” Colette said. She made herself as comfortable as possible in her pencil skirt on the edge of Elm’s desk. Elm noticed Colette’s shoes had small bows that matched the trim on her suit. Colette cleared her throat and stared straight at Elm, her eyes narrowed and focused, somehow too shiny in the fluorescent light. Had she done something cosmetically to make them sparkle?

  Elm was acutely conscious of being watched. A familiar feeling of worthlessness and exhaustion overtook her. She was sick of people’s disapproval. She turned away from Colette’s gaze and let herself look at Ronan’s picture on her desk. Sometimes looking at him gave her peace, quelled the nameless feeling that wasn’t as acute as grief or as chronic as depression.

  He was, as he would remain forever, a little boy, eight years old. This was the last picture she had taken of him, one of the few from that vacation where he was alone in the frame, not clowning with Colin or fighting with his sister. He had the Tinsley avian nose, but Colin’s coloring, his gray eyes and blond hair. He was a beautiful child, Elm thought. Was he beautiful to outsiders too? she wondered. She didn’t know; she’d spent so much time staring at that face that it ceased to be a whole. Each part of him was a memory—the ancestral nose, the ears that stuck out just a little too much, the way Colin’s did. His cheeks, ruddy after soccer in the cold; the hair that once got gum stuck in it which he had tried to hide with a hat for three days; the hairless torso, puffed with childhood; the mauve swimming trunks she’d bought him that he wanted to wear all the time, pockets turned out. In this picture, he was standing with his profile to the camera, his gaze out to sea. Elm resisted the temptation to see the wise forehead of the seer, tried not to imagine that he knew the water would swallow him. It was impossible. He was looking out to sea because there were diving boats heading in from the morning’s expedition, and he couldn’t wait to turn twelve so he could dive too. He knew nothing of the water’s plans. No one did.

  Colette said, “I have something for you.”

  “Oh?” Elm tried not to sound too interested.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have made a very interesting acquaintance.” Colette studied her hand.

  Two women: a portrait of nonchalance, Elm thought, captioning the moment. They could cut to the chase or they’d be here all afternoon, apathetically making small talk until dinner.

  “Yes?” she prodded.

  “A dealer.”

  “And …” Elm encouraged her.

  “He has procured interesting pieces.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  Colette smiled sweetly, as innocently as she could. Her eyes opened wide as if to say, Why would I not want to share good news with you? She had curled the pieces of hair that escaped her bun into tightly obedient ringlets.

  “Some of it is minor, but the sheer volume … pof!” She didn’t so much exclaim as let breath leave her lips in that slightly aroused Gallic expression. “Vertu, Hogarth, Moreau … Good condition, slight mold but completely restorable.”

  “You’ve seen them?”

  “Why, yes,” Colette said. “I saw them and I said to myself, How exquisite, I must rush to tell Elmira.”

  “So I’m supposed to commission them for the auction.”

  “If you have half the eye they say you do, you can do nothing but.”

  “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I feel like there’s a catch.” She clarified: “Something you want from me.”

  Colette smiled. “I am a small fish playing with the bigs,” she said. “No major auction has occurred in Paris since 1941, this is no secret.” During World War II, Paris ceased to be the center of the art world, and it never recovered its status. Now London, New York, and Tokyo were the only places major events were held. Tinsley’s Paris office, the “outpost,” they called it, was more for letterhead than for actual business. It was located on the second floor of a Champs-Élysées building, nondescript, but in the correct Eighth Arrondissement. When they held their auctions, meager affairs—the good stuff always came to New York or London—they rented space nearby. It was not an ideal arrangement, but it had worked decently well for fifty years, and so, in true old-school business style, they left things as they were. Someone went over there once a month or so to see what was happening in the office. Really, it was an excuse to travel to Paris, which no one in the Tinsley upper echelon ever passed up.

  Colette continued, “Perhaps you will remember that I helped you when there is an opportunity for an associate specialist position in New York? Or even senio
r specialist?”

  Before Elm could change her face muscles to laugh the ludicrous cackle she wanted to, Colette was down the hall, leaving a strawberry scent in her wake.

  “What was that scurrying noise I heard?” Ian stuck his head around Elm’s door. “Was there an errant crumb to be gathered?”

  “Colette wants me to recommend her for associate specialist in New York.”

  “Ahhh,” Ian sighed. “That would be, unless I’m mistaken, a position I currently hold?”

  “And that you will continue to hold. Don’t worry. She’s found some sort of treasure trove. She wants to plumb its depths.”

  “Don’t mix metaphors, it’s unseemly.” He closed the door behind him and moved a pile of papers, then unbuttoned his jacket to sit on the low couch. “You know the photocopy room?” His knees were higher than his chest. Elm often forgot he was tall; he had a short man’s willingness to please. The look on his face was one of worry.

  “Yes,” said Elm, impatient. “I am acquainted with the photocopy room. In fact, it doubles as the supply room, they tell me.”

  “Listen, Elm, this is serious. You know how you can hear the ladies’ room from there?”

  “You can?” Elm thought back to all the times she’d sat in a stall, bawling her eyes out.

  “There’s a vent. Anyway, Colette was in there, on the phone.”

  “Of course, your scrupulous honesty prevented you from listening.”

  “She wants my job, Elm.”

  “Since when do you speak French?”

  “She was talking in English. To Joel. From transportation? You know she’s fucking him.”

  “No, I didn’t. I don’t know anything around here.” Elm tried to put a face to Joel from transportation, and came up with a hazy picture of a man with novelty facial hair. He was basically in charge of shipping, which required expertise in its own right, knowing the medium and its preferred way to travel, designing packaging for fragile items, and occasionally transporting the invaluable item personally. Elm had once flown on Air France with a Fabergé egg on her lap. She’d brought it with her to the bathroom, balancing the package on the small metal sink while she urinated.